CHAPTER XLIX

ALF MARKS TIME

The scene outside the parish-church in Old Town, when Mrs. Lewknor challenged the Archdeacon, marked the turn in Ernie's material fortunes.

The Reverend Spink handed on his version of the affair to Mr. Pigott at the Relief Committee that evening.

"He was laying on his face in the road _dead_ drunk opposite the church-door when his brother picked him up," he reported, round-eyed and spectacled. "His poor, _poor_ people!"

"Ah," said Mr. Pigott, "was he?--I know where you got that story from."

The curate tried to be rude in his turn, but he was not so good at it as the more experienced man.

"Such a place to choose!" he continued, turning to Colonel Lewknor. "Opposite the church-door! Just like him!"

"Such a place, indeed!" echoed the Colonel, quiet and courteous. "What's the good of lying down to die of starvation at the door of the _Church_ of all places? Will she open to you?"

Mr. Pigott disliked the Reverend Spink almost as much as he disliked the curate's protégé. Next day the contrary man sent for Ernie and offered him a job as lorry-man in the Transport Company.

"I know you and you know me," he said in his most aggressive manner. "So it's no good telling a pack o lies to each other that I can see. Start at twenty-three a week, with chances of a rise if you keep at it steady. Begin Monday.... And it's your last chance, mind!"

Ernie ignored the insults and leapt at the offer.

The Southdown Transport Company ran motor-lorries between Newhaven and Beachbourne, carrying seaborne coal and other merchandise from the harbour on the Ouse to the town under Beau-nez.

Ernie liked the work.

It kept him out of doors, under the sky, and in touch with the old-world elemental things he loved. The breath and bustle of the harbour at Newhaven; the long ride on the motor-lorry through the hill-country at all seasons of the year; even the pleasant acrid smell of the coal and coke in the lorry and on his overalls was pleasant and satisfying to him.

He worked steadily, paid his debts, and for the first time in his life began gradually to save money.

That autumn his father asked him if he wouldn't return home to live.

"Alfred's left us," said the old man.

"Has he?" asked Ernie surprised. "Where's he gone then?"

"He's gone to live above his garage," replied the other. "Something's happening to Alfred," he added. "I don't know what."

Alf, in fact, was changing; and Mr. Trupp was watching the evolution of his chauffeur with a detached scientific interest that his wife defined as inhuman.

And that evolution was proceeding apace. Alf was living alone above his garage; he had introduced a girl into his office; and he was no longer getting on.

Mr. Trupp noted the last as far the most significant symptom of the three.

Alf had climbed in his career to a certain point, and there he stuck fast. His business neither went ahead nor back. He was still doing well and saving money. The wonder was that he was not doing better.

But the reason was clear enough to the penetrating eye of the old surgeon, to whom his chauffeur was an absorbing study in mental pathology: Alf was no more a man of one idea; his energies were no longer concentrated solely on getting on to the exclusion of all else. The emotional side of him, battered down from infancy, was revenging itself at last. Desperately it was seeking an outlet, no matter how perverted: certainly it would find one.

"He's suffering from life-long repression," the Doctor told his wife. "Now he's got to find a safety-valve."

In his own mind Mr. Trupp had no doubt as to the form the safety-valve would take.

About that time Mrs. Trupp, meeting Mr. Pigott in the Moot, asked him how his new hand was getting on.

"Working steady as Old Time," replied the other with satisfaction.

"I like the look upon his face," Mrs. Trupp remarked. "He's always expecting."

"Yes," replied the old school-master, "expecting angels--like his father."

"Perhaps he'll find them," smiled Mrs. Trupp.

That evening, as it chanced, she met her godson under the elms in Saffrons Croft, and stopped him.

It was May now. The hope illuminating air and sky and every living thing was reflected in Ernie's face. Indeed the young man looked inspired.

The two regarded each other affectionately.

"Ernie," said the lady, colouring faintly.

"Yes, 'm."

"Are you still thinking of that girl you told me about?"

The other's face glowed like the moon.

"I never hardly think of nothing else, 'm."

"I knew you were," answered Mrs. Trupp. She added with a sudden lovely smile: "You'll find her--if you're faithful."

"That's what dad keeps on, 'm," Ernie answered. "And I know I shall too. See, I keep all the while a-drawin her to me." He made the motion of one hauling on a line. "She can't escape me--not nohows."

He turned on her the earnest eyes of the evangelist, and began to wag an impressive finger in the way she loved.

"See, you can draw down what you want--_only you must want it with all your heart_. 'Taint no good without that. Alf, now, he draws down money. For why?--that's what he wants. Now I want something else."

The lady regarded him with wise shrewd interest.

This New Thought, as the foolish called it, how old it was, how universal, how deeply embedded in the primitive consciousness of the common man! Ernie, to be sure, did not read Edward Carpenter nor the works of any of that school; but instinct and experience had led him to knock at the same door.

"And if Alf wanted something different, too?" she asked.

Ernie shook a sceptical head.

"He wouldn't--not really. That ain't Alf. Money's what Alf wants and what he gets by consequence. He's only for himself, Alf is. If he went out a'ter anything else he'd only go half-hearted like, therefore he wouldn't get it. He'd be a house divided against hissalf. So he'd fall."

The two brothers now rarely met and never spoke.

Just sometimes Ernie in his grimy overall, sitting with arms crossed and sooty face upon a load of coal in the jolting lorry, would be passed by Alf at the wheel of his thirty horse-power car, stealing by without an effort or a sound, swift as the wind, silent as the tide.

On these occasions Ernie, perched aloft on his load, would detect the smirk on his brother's face, and knew that Alf was feeling his own superiority and hoping that Ernie felt it too.

In those days Ernie learned to know the corner of England in the triangle between Lewes, the Seven Sisters, and Beau-nez as he had never known it before. And the closer grew his intimacy the greater became his love.

The quiet, the strength, the noble rounded comeliness of the hills reminded him of the woman he sought. True, she disturbed him, present or absent; while they, in act or retrospect, comforted. But their full round breasts, rising clean and clear before him, stubble-crowned, green, purple, or golden against the blue, gave him a sense of earth rooted in the immensity of spirit and washed by the winds of heaven as did nothing else he knew but the woman he had lost.

"Wish I were a poet," he sometimes said to his father. "To put it all down what I feel, so others could see it too."

"Perhaps you are," his father replied.

And certainly if to be a poet is to love the familiar objects of the road, a poet Ernie was: for he loved them all--Lewes with its narrow streets, its steep hill to which you cling like a fly on a pane and look across to Mount Caburn for help; the old _Pelham Arms_, its walnut-tree at the back, the _Fox_, the _Barley Mow_, the _Newmarket_ on the Brighton road; the hills running down in glorious nakedness to the highway, the tanned harvesters sitting among their sheaves; peeps of the blue Weald islanded with woods; and always accompanying him the long wall of the Downs, gloomy or gleaming, here smooth as the flanks of a race-horse, there scarred, grim, weather-worn and pocked, in winter dazzling white beneath the blue, ruddy in autumn sunsets, emerald in April days; and all the year gathering the shadows at evening in the Northward coombes to spill them over the expectant Weald like purple wine when the door of night had closed upon the sun.

The lorries to and from Newhaven always took their way through the valley of the Ruther. Once or twice in that winter, as they bumped down High'nd Over from Sea-foord into Aldwoldston at evening, Ernie was surprised to find the chocolate-bodied car lying apparently derelict in the roadway at the steep entrance to the village; and wondered if the surviving Miss Caryll who still lived in the Dowerhouse at the foot of the hill was ill.

And again one evening in the spring, as he jolted through the village-street, past the great chestnut lit with a thousand tapers in the market-square, he was aware of a man on a motor-bicycle pelting past him up the hill. The man wore motor-goggles; but there was no mistaking Alf, bowed over his handles, flashing past the _Lamb_, down the hill, and out of sight.

What was Alf doing at that hour of the evening on the road to Sea-foord?